In this case, that was about $8,000 because all of the wiring needed to be redone in order to replace very old wire and make sure everything was grounded appropriately.

Now imagine that we’d purchased the house and assumed we’d receive our $500 cash flow each month.

It’s unlikely that we’d just out of the blue replace the wiring, so that means we’d have found out because an event would have happened, such as an electrical fire.

That leads to damage on the walls, liability with the tenants, possibly getting sued or fined.

That $500 cash flow would have easily turned into a negative number for a long time had we not found it before the purchase to, not only renegotiate our deal, but also catch and fix the problem before it turned into a disaster.

Home inspections should damn-near be mandatory

In some cases, they are, as some banks will require an inspection to be done on an existing home.

Even with new construction, there are phase inspections that are done to ensure that things are done properly.

You also want inspections to be done by a third-party and not the builder himself, as they can easily cut corners or lie about things, claiming that you signed off on it.

That’s really not much for basically an insurance on your purchase of upwards of several hundred thousands of dollars.

And it’s only a one-time thing.

If you’re sure that other parts of the home are in great shape and simply need one component checked out, you can always just do a partial inspection, which just breaks down the inspection process in only the parts of the house that you want.

This saves the inspector time and saves you money, while making the deal much more quickly.

The reality is, when you’re making a big financial decision and investment like with a property, you want to make sure you’re being sold what you believe you are buying.